When I wrote “The Mental Performance Index: Ranking the Best Teams in Super Bowl History,” I knew that Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ers were good, but I did not know how good until I crunched all the data and ranked the teams from 1-90. It would turn out that the 49ers teams own 3 of the top 6 spots of all time in terms of performance on Super Sunday. Much of this was the doing of the late great coach Bill Walsh.

I met and befriended Lesley Visser as I was getting ready to go over to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympic games. We shared a common interest in tennis and football, and she was very excited about my upcoming book and offered to write the epilogue. She wanted to write it about Bill Walsh, whom she had known from her many NFL broadcasts, and I was thrilled. She did a terrific job and you can now read about what made this man so enormously successful as a coach.

For example, you will read that while Walsh projected an image as the intellectual professor, and did not like to yell at his players, he was anything but soft. In fact, he was an amateur boxer and he liked to study the intricate moves of Mohammed Ali, and he used the principles he learned from boxing (like coaching his team’s offensive and defensive lines to always explode off the ball faster than the opponent) to make his team better.